Mapping the Black Death
Mapping the Black Death
Durham University
Project overview
Project owner: Dr. Alex Brown, Department of History, Durham University
Funding requested: 1400GBP
Project details
The Black Death of 1348–9 stands “unchallenged as the greatest disaster in documented human history,” yet the characteristics of the disease that killed approximately half the population of Europe in just a handful of years have long confounded academics. Although largely thought to be caused by bubonic plague, it is still unclear how the disease spread so quickly in a preindustrial society. This project is part of a larger effort to use the latest computer modelling developed in response to the COVID-19 outbreak to simulate the spread of the Black Death in England.
One of the most important pieces of evidence for the national spread of the disease is the appointment of a new parish priest after the death of the incumbent. We have collected this information for the Black Death itself but need to extend this to the preceding decade in order to understand how the crisis year of 1348–9 relates to normal clerical appointments. This will tell us about background mortality rates and whether these varied seasonally. Depending upon the skills and research interests of the appointed researcher, this task could involve either a) working through the translated material to extract this information by hand or b) using a series of large language models to extract the relevant evidence automatically, and then cross-check it by hand.
This research will prove vital in both mapping and modelling the spread of the Black Death itself, whilst also providing a trove of interesting material on clerical appointments in the middle of the fourteenth century.
1400GBP would fund a research assistant to work for 100 hours at the Real Living Wage rate.